On this day in 1992: Tom Waits released Bone Machine

Album Review: Tom Waits, Bone Machine

Originally published in Hot Press in 1992

See him after midnight in the trailer-park: beside his fire with its strange aromas, the withered man with the parched voice and the piercing eyes with even stranger talismans on his jacket.

Somebody says he used to be a numbers runner; somebody says he was once an evangelist to bums and short-order waitresses; the rumours swirl like smoke rings round his head.

You can't gauge his age; his face keeps changing in the firelight. But he's always reminiscing about his good friends, Charley Patton and Jelly Roll Morton. Listen on and you never really know whether he's selling sex, snake-oil or salvation. You leave, maybe thinking the three are the same…

The mythology Waits returns. Bone Machine is a record of ghosts that refuse to perish or recur with consistency. Instead they reincarnate in ever-more grotesquely alluring forms.

The mythologist remains minimal in his musical methods. Only the most fundamental drums and the most basic instruments interest him. Occasionally, he uses a Chamberlain for goose-fat but Bone Machine plays exactly as its title promises – the rhythms of sex. The thigh bone is always connected to the hip-bone.

Its ghosts are musical: Dr. John, Duke Ellington, Moondog, even recent William Burroughs to count only a few. Bone Machine is an album where all the primary shapes of American music get remoulded as if Waits is searching for some early primitive link between them way back when in the Mississippi swamps and steamboats of the 1850s. What sounds surreally modern here may instead sometimes be unfamiliarly ancient.

These ghosts are also mythological. Bone Machine could be an after-hours party in New Orleans, Tangiers and fifties Greenwich all at once, where the hash is unfurling eerie dreams and you never can tell who the ever-changing demon beside your really is. Mafia hoods blur into Voodoo Gods blur into Southern white trash with guilt-edged secrets blur into comic cartoon villains blur into wise and vanishing old hoboes. Waits juggles with all the aspects of America's subconscious.

The centre-piece sequence of our songs says it all. 'In the Colosseum' tears apart the antiseptic media gloss of American politics to reveal the naked barbarism of power; 'Goin' Out West' has a misfit goon driving to California with a guitar line mutilated from surfing instrumentals and 'Murder In The Red Barn' is a Southern murder melodrama which never discloses the guilty party since it doesn't matter: all its characters, and even the weather, have a share in the misdeed.

Then there's the ambivalent demi-god of 'Black Wings' who "once killed a man with a guitar string/he's been seen at the table with kings/Well he once saved a baby from drowning/There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings". Myth never co-habits easily with good or evil, straight.

Yet Waits also can still write comfortably identifiable songs like 'Whistle Down The Wind' or 'A Little Rain' that could be covered and/or anaesthetised by the likes of Rod Stewart. But he'll let them join the dots with programmer-friendly arrangements, frankly, Tom doesn't give a damn!

There's so many delights here. 'Jesus Gonna Be Here' envisages Christianity declining into a western cargo-cult while the opening 'Earth Died Screaming' has an apocalyptic ecological theme with an outlandishly Fortean nightmare of perdition when "the stars fell out/And the moon fell from the sky/It rained mackerel/It rained trout".

At times, Tom Wait's varying distance from his themes and personae can make you feel it's all a masquerade. The achievement on Bone Machine is that it is so packed with engrossing ideas you rarely pause to notice.

– Bill Graham

The Murder Capital's Damien Tuit on Bone Machine

Originally published in Hot Press in 2019:

Deftly fusing the raw, earthy tones of America’s delta blues with vaudeville aesthetics, punk and an unrivalled understanding of kitsch sentimentality, Bone Machine saw Tom Waits once again trudging relentlessly forward into the unknown.

I was first introduced to Waits as a light, breezy songwriter with one or two great albums to his name, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I discovered the true weight and breadth of his discography for myself. Since immersing myself in his world, I have found the textural and emotional variety of his work to be unrivalled. He’s a musician unsatisfied with treading the same ground as his contemporaries, and yet rarely does he allow his exploration to come at a cost to the beautiful, bare-bones songwriting craft he has spent so many years honing.

For me, what is truly inspiring about Waits is his bravery. Few artists would dare to combine the raucous energy of ‘Such A Scream’ with the delicate, heartbreaking stillness of ‘A Little Rain’ on the same LP. With Bone Machine, Tom Waits gloriously showcases the power of contrast within the album format.